The EDVAC computer system of 1948 is cited by many as the dawn of the computer era. In the years since 1948, use of computers has proliferated to the extent that they have found their way into most every aspect of day to day life. The primary reason for this proliferation is the fact that computer systems are now used to perform many of the tasks that used to be performed by hand or with the aid of crude devices. Drawing pictures and composing letters and documents are two tasks which are now performed more efficiently with computer systems. In the past, drawing pictures and composing documents had been done through the use of paper and pencil, or possibly, through the use of a typewriter. Today, tools such as graphics editors and word processors allow computer system users to draw pictures, create presentations, and compose letters and documents much more quickly and efficiently.
Present day tools are able to perform these tasks much more speedily and efficiently because of two fundamental advancements. First, making changes to drawings and documents is much easier with tools such as graphics editors and word processors because drawings and documents are stored in electronic form inside the computer system's memory instead of on paper or some other limited media. Accordingly, the computer system user does not need to make messy erasures or redraw or retype entire portions of drawings and documents. Instead, the user need only retrieve the item from the computer system's memory, make the necessary change to the electronic representation of the item, and place the item back in memory.
The second fundamental advancement is the provision of special processing functions. Beyond providing basic editing capability (i.e., the ability to create, modify, store, and output drawings and documents), present day tools often provide special processing functions such as: automatic pagination, grammar checking, automatic hyphenation, and spell checking. These special processing functions further enhance efficiency by automating subtasks that would otherwise need to be performed manually. Spell checking, for example, is now done with the click of a button instead of by a manual, dictionary assisted, word by word review.
The problem with many of these special processing functions, though, is that they tend to be slow and unintelligent, particularly with drawings and documents that involve many pages. For example, spell checking features (called spell checkers) are often exceedingly slow because they operate by repeatedly rechecking the entire document for spelling mistakes. While this is typically not a problem for small documents that are a page or two in length, it can be an excruciating task for medium to large size documents. Some tools attempt to resolve this problem by providing the user with the ability to select a portion of the drawing or document upon which the special processing function will operate. This approach is helpful to the user because the user is not forced to go through the entire drawing or document each time one of these special processing functions is needed. However, the ability to select portions of drawings and documents can be considered only a partial solution at best. Even if the tool allows the user to select portions of drawings and documents at a very fine grain (e.g., on a word by word basis in the case of a word processor), the tool is still requiring the user to remember (or at least decide) what portion to select. Further, the user may want a special processing function to operate on several, non-adjacent portions of a drawing or document. If this is the case, the user must not only remember the relative location of all the portions to be selected, but the user must also select each portion one at a time. Naturally, this can be an extremely frustrating and time consuming experience.
Without an enhancement that adds intelligence and saves user time, these special processing functions will continue to limit the productivity gains that many computer based tools are designed to provide.